The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980

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Female writing becomes more rebellious in nature and attempts to protest male authority along with the values and standards associated with a male-dominated mentality; fighting for freedom and autonomy; refers to post-Victorian age For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions. Guenter B. Risse, ‘Hysteria at the Edinburgh Infirmary: The Construction and Treatment of a Disease, 1770-

The female malady by Elaine Showalter | Open Library The female malady by Elaine Showalter | Open Library

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below. Nancy M. Theriot, ‘Women’s Voices in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse: A Step toward Deconstructing Science’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 19 (1993), 1-31. e-journal Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL2374091M Openlibrary_edition Showalter's writing is so engaging and her ideas are really compelling. Before reading, I thought I had the topic figured out - it seems quite evident if you've read anything about mental illness and feminism. But I was gladly mistaken - her arguments are very nuanced and focused and made me think about facets of the topic I hadn't previously. In addition, a historical scope like this can often make texts feel rushed, spending not enough time on each time period. This text never really felt like that. For my interests, I would have loved more time spent on the more recent years, but that would have made it unbalanced in treatment.Portrait of Mad Margery, a young woman driven mad and living in the fields, possibly taken from a popular song ‘Poor Mad Margery’ c.1790-1800. By James John Hill c.1830-70. Bringing to light female writers that have been overshadowed by the dominance of western canon that predominately contains male writers Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-11-16 16:01:39 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA40763007 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Mark S. Micale, ‘Charcot and the Idea of Hysteria in the Male: Gender, Mental Science, and Mental Diagnosis in Late Nineteenth-Century France’, Medical History, 34 (1990), 363-411. e-journal

The Female Malady) - Goodreads Elaine Showalter Quotes (Author of The Female Malady) - Goodreads

Roy Porter, A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), ch. 6 ‘Mad Women’. Multiple copies in library Our images of madness, she argues, are disproportionately female: ‘women, within our dualistic systems of language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture and mind.’ Romantic portraits of Crazy Jane, a poor servant girl seduced and abandoned by her lover; Lucia di Lammermoor with its picture of female sexuality as insane violence against men; Bertha Mason and Gothic madness – violent and hideous animality kept caged in Mr Rochester’s attic lest a ‘clothed hyena’ be let loose upon the world: in novels, in drama, in poetry, in painting, in popular ballads, in opera, it is women who stand as emblems and exemplars of irrationality. Mark S. Micale (ed.) , The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2004), esp chs 1-2. Mental health is quite a misnomer, in any case, for the most part of this book, for women were considered "mad" for the most innocuous of "offences". Suffice it to say that I wanted to set my own hair on fire while reading the travesties that women committed against society: the travesty of wanting dignity to raise their children out of poverty; the travesty of earning a decent wage for a profession of choice, and not relegated to the kitchen or the scrubhouse; the travesty of wanting a voice in how their bodies were treated; the travesty of wanting a say in society. All these were crimes for which at one time or other women were imprisoned in asylums for merely speaking their minds. Oh, and you'd definitely not want to speak your mind. That in itself is the worst travesty. Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She is one of the founders of feminist literary criticism in United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics.Hilary Marland, Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004). Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby (eds), Sex and Seclusion, Class and Custody: Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004). (An excellent collection of essays; several of the essays challenge Showalter’s findings and emphasis on ‘gender’, see e.g. the articles of Wright, Levine-Clark and Michael but don’t ignore the rest.) e-book and several copies in library I read this book from cover to cover and would have been very happy if it were a school text. One of the things I liked most about the book was its personal approach, using the perspectives of female "inmates" themselves, and fiction excerpts from a variety of authors, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Bronte, Doris Lessing, and others to highlight women's mental health issues and experiences with doctors and provide an insight into the culture and period. Excellent review of how little has changed in the past 150-200 years of the treatment of psychopathology in women. This is a historical piece about the experiences of women whose deviations from femininity are and have been pathologized and how cultural sexism causes psychopathological experiences, not a review/critique of the science of psychopathology, and it fulfills its purpose quite well.